The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  The auctioneer, like the judge at a trial, has the power to enthrall his audience. At the podium in Geneva was the tall and debonair Nicholas Rayner. It was he who first approached Maître Suzanne Blum, the keeper of the Windsor flame, about the disposition of the Duchess’s jewels. A notoriously difficult woman, the octogenarian Maître Blum is said to have been charmed by Rayner, and because of him she entrusted the jewels to Sotheby’s. The charm that captivated Maître Blum captivated all the women in the tent as well. “Divine,” said one woman about Rayner. “And separated,” said another, as if that fact added to his glamour. Although he was criticized by a few purists for several times allowing the bidding to continue after he had dropped the gavel—he said that since the money was going to charity the ordinary rules did not apply—he won over far more people than he alienated. He had a sense of theater, realized that he was in a leading role, and understood exactly how to keep this audience in the palm of his hand. Graceful, witty, he was Cary Grant at forty, giving the kind of performance that turns a good actor into a major star. At the end of the second day, when the total sales had reached $50 million, the audience rose and gave Rayner a standing ovation which rivaled any that Lord Olivier ever received.

  It was a sad disappointment to auction voyeurs that they could not turn around and stare at Miss Elizabeth Taylor raising her already jeweled hand to bid $623,000 for a diamond clip known as the Prince of Wales feathers brooch, which Richard Burton had once admired on the Duchess, for the simple reason that Miss Taylor had chosen to make her bid by telephone while suntanning next to her swimming pool in Bel-Air, California. They could not watch the multimillionaire dress designer Calvin Klein either, as he bid by telephone from New York $733,000 for a single-row pearl necklace by Cartier, or $198,000 for another single-row pearl necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels, or a mere $102,600 for a pearl-and-diamond eternity ring by Darde & Fils of Paris, or $300,600 for a pearl-and-diamond pendant by Cartier, for which he outbid the Duchess’s friend and frequent New York hostess Estée Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon, and all for his beauteous new wife, Kelly. Expensive, yes, but Van Cleef & Arpels had told Calvin Klein it would take ten years to match pearls for the necklace he had in mind and cost several million dollars. He told the press that he was not going to wait for a special day to give them to Kelly. “The best presents just happen,” he said.

  Under the marquee, only Marvin Mitchelson, the Hollywood divorce lawyer, who built his fortune on the failed marriages of the famous, broke the rules of anonymity and had himself announced as the purchaser of the Duchess’s amethyst-and-turquoise necklace for $605,000. He further wanted it announced that he dedicated the purchase to the memory of his mother, who had worked to put him through law school. Mitchelson also purchased a huge sapphire brooch for $374,000 for someone else, a client whom he would not name, although he tantalized the press by hinting that it was Joan Collins, whom he was representing in her latest divorce.

  In seats every bit as good as the seats occupied by the Princess of Naples and Princess Firyal of Jordan sat two dark-haired beauties in Chanel suits—real Chanel suits, not knockoffs—who were there to bid, not gape. They scrutinized their catalogs, and they had mink coats folded over their knees. Their stockings had seams, a subtle signal to the cognoscenti of such things that they were wearing garter belts, not panty hose. Ms. X and Ms. Y, two international ladies of the evening, told me they were staying at the Richemond, where they felt as at home as they do at the Plaza Athénée or the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ms. X had her heart set on lot 26, a pavé diamond heart with a gold-and-ruby crown and the initials W. and E., for Wallis and Edward, intertwined in emeralds. It had been the twentieth-wedding-anniversary present of the Duke to the Duchess. Ms. Y had her heart set on lot 31, a single-row diamond bracelet with nine gem-set Latin crosses hanging from it. The Duchess had worn it on her wedding day in 1937 and had once remarked that the crosses represented the crosses she had to bear. Ms. X said about Ms. Y, jokingly, that she wanted the bracelet with the crosses to wear on her whipping hand. Used to the best, Ms. Y has a custom-made bag by Hermès to carry her whips in. She didn’t get the bracelet with the crosses, which went for $381,000. Ms. X didn’t get the pavé diamond heart either. It went for $300,000. “The prices just got out of hand. We were a couple of zeros too short,” Ms. X told me during a break. “That heart probably belongs to Candy Spelling by now. Come and have tea tomorrow. We’re free until ten.”

  Of course there was the inevitable Japanese, with millions at his disposal, who said he would have gone even higher than the $3.15 million he paid for the Duchess’s solitary diamond. Hours later, no one could remember his name or his face.

  There will be other jewel sales, even better jewel sales, but that night in Geneva, the jewel capital of the world, people wanted, at any price, no holds barred, something about which they could say, “This belonged to the Duchess of Windsor,” because they knew that they were buying romance and history. Nowhere was this so evident as in lot 68, a pearl-and-diamond choker, which Nicholas Rayner carefully pointed out was imitation. The choker then sold for $51,000. The sale of the Duchess’s jewels, coming as it did only a few days after the $39.9 million sale of a Van Gogh sunflowers painting, whose chrome yellow paint had turned brown, made one realize the enormous amount of money there is in the world waiting to be spent, even for the imperfect, if the credentials are OK.

  In the back of the tent, unknown to most of the people there, sat Georges Sanègre and his wife, Ofélia, the longtime butler and maid to the Duke and Duchess, quietly watching the personal possessions of their former employers make auction history. Not physically present, but prominently there in spirit, was the old and elusive Maître Blum, called Mrs. Blum by her detractors, who are legion. Maître Blum, who had met the Windsors in Portugal during World War II and then been their French lawyer for forty years, followed every moment of the auction by telephone from Paris and knew minute by minute everything that was going on.

  Maître Blum’s relationship with the former king and his duchess was strictly a business one. Social contact was limited to two dinners or lunches a year, and those in the context of business courtesy rather than friendship. The Duke was thought to have more regard for her than the Duchess, who, friends say, wanted to fire her after the Duke’s death, but whose increasing mental confusion made this impossible.

  “She lost her mind, you know,” people told me about the Duchess, “during the last decade of her life.” Or, “She was gaga.” Or, “A veg.” The on-dit, as these people say, meaning the gossip, or inside story, is that the Duchess insisted on having a final face-lift even though she was advised not to because of her age. Plastic surgeons in England and France declined to perform the operation, and warned her about the effects of anesthesia on people over seventy. Determined, she persevered. A plastic surgeon from another country performed the operation, in the course of which there was a technical difficulty with the anesthesia and the air to the Duchess’s brain was briefly cut off. This is widely said to be the cause of the derangement that came on her after her husband’s death. During her stay at Buckingham Palace at the time of the Duke’s funeral, she often thought she was in Paris, and she mistook the Queen Victoria fountain, which she could see from the palace windows, for the Place de la Concorde. The Duke, before he died, aware that the Duchess’s mind had begun to wander, entrusted her care to Maître Blum.

  Shortly after the Duke’s death, when the Duchess was in a confused and vulnerable state, all his private papers were confiscated, possibly under the direction of his cousin Lord Mountbatten, acting on behalf of the royal family. These papers now reside in the archives of Windsor Castle, unavailable to the public. Georges, the butler, is said to have hidden the love letters of the Duke and Duchess to prevent their being carried off in the same swoop. The letters he rescued were later published under the title Wallis and Edward, Letters 1931–1937: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  It was the Duke’s wis
h, so stated in his will, that the Duchess’s jewels be removed from their settings after her death so that the pieces could never be worn by any other woman, but such was not the Duchess’s wish. People who have had access to the Duchess’s private papers tell me that several Americans tried to persuade the Duchess, because she was American, to leave her jewels, in whole or in part, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Another suggestion was that she leave her jewels to the White House, as a permanent collection for the First Lady of the United States to wear. Although Maître Blum is most often blamed for nixing these American plans for the disposition of the collection, it was the Duchess herself who decided that France, the country that had given her refuge for fifty years, should be the beneficiary. There are unkind people who will tell you that if the Duchess had had her way, all her money would have been left to a dog hospital. The truth is, Maître Blum prevailed upon the Duchess to leave the money to the Pasteur Institute, the leading medical-research institution in France.

  People familiar with the Windsors noticed, looking at the jewelry, that a great many pieces were missing. “What happened to all the Fulco di Verdura pieces?” they asked, referring to the designs of the Sicilian Duke di Verdura, whose scrapbooks show a great number of pieces he made for the Duchess which were not in the auction. Or, one heard in Geneva and later in New York, “All those marvelous things on her tables—her bibelots—what has become of those, we wonder?” The implication, each time the rhetorical question is asked, is that malfeasance was afoot. Michael Bloch, who edited the book of the couple’s love letters, is adamant in his defense of Maître Blum. He affirms that she has not profited at all in the disposal of the estate, and his strong feelings are borne out by several other people close to the couple.

  The Duchess had, in effect, an almost ten-year death, with nurses around the clock. The family fortune, in terms of hard cold cash, at the time of the Duke’s death was around $1 million—not a great deal of money for people with their standard of living. The high cost of a royal death was prohibitive, and, curiously, the Duchess did not have medical insurance. From time to time during the years of the long illness, Maître Blum sold off pieces of jewelry, sets of china, or the odd Bergère chair or ormolu table to pay off the medical costs. Several years ago, for instance, Mrs. São Schlumberger of Paris bought a ruby necklace. A Sotheby’s official assured me that the price she paid was at the top of the market at the time. Nate Cummings, the late American millionaire, collector, and friend of the Duke and Duchess, bought, among other things, a set of vermeil plates. Maître Blum also sold some bead necklaces in emeralds, rubies, and sapphires to the London firm of Hennell, who traveled to Beverly Hills with their wares before the auction. Candy Spelling, the wife of the television mogul Aaron Spelling and the possessor of one of the most spectacular jewel collections in the country, bought one of the necklaces. Another was sold to Mrs. Muriel Slatkin, the former owner, with her sister, Seema Boesky, the wife of the Wall Street swindler Ivan Boesky, of the Beverly Hills Hotel. A third was sold to Mrs. Marvin Davis, the wife of one of the country’s richest men, who is, incidentally, the new owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Also, the Duchess gave away several pieces of her jewelry before she died. Princess Alexandra, a favorite niece of the Duke, received a piece. Princess Michael of Kent, whose own popularity in the royal family is on a par with the Duchess’s, won the heart of her husband’s aunt by marriage by calling her in a letter “Dear Aunt Wallis,” thereby likening her own marriage to that of the Windsors, and she too was rewarded.

  The Duchess in her will mentioned certain people, like the American-born Countess of Romanoes, who received a diamond bracelet with an inscription from the Duke to the Duchess engraved on the back of it. When the item to be inherited was not specified, it was left to the discretion of Maître Blum, and in this role the mighty maître exerted her authority to the fullest. One lady of haughty bearing irritated Maître Blum exceedingly at the time of the Duchess’s funeral by assuming too important a position and attitude among the mourners. Months later, her bijou of inheritance still undelivered, the haughty lady is said to have wailed to her friends, “Why does Maître Blum hate me so?” Her inheritance was the last to be distributed and the least important of the lot in both beauty and value.

  No one lingers in Geneva. At fifteen minutes before eight the morning after the sale, Alfred Taubman, a huge unlit cigar balanced between his teeth, paced back and forth in front of the Hôtel Richemond, impatience in his every step. The auction was over, history made, he wanted to be gone. The jacket of his double-breasted gray flannel suit was unbuttoned. A cashmere scarf was wrapped Dickensian-style around his neck against the brisk lake breezes. By the curb three dark blue Mercedeses were being loaded with first-rate luggage, and he was directing the operation. Nervous minions offered assistance.

  “How much …?” someone started to ask him, meaning how much had the auction grossed.

  “Forty-nine million plus,” he answered, interrupting the question before it was finished. It was not the first time he had been asked the question since the night before, and he was proud of the figure.

  “Call upstairs to Mrs. Taubman,” he told the hall porter, walking back into the lobby of the hotel. “I left my yellow handkerchief behind. Tell her to find it.” He walked back out to the street again. “C’mon. Let’s get this show on the road.” He did not like to be kept waiting. “Between Judy and Princess Firyal …” he said, shaking his head in exasperation at the delays women cause. Finally all was ready. “We’re going to General Aviation, where my plane is,” he said to the driver of the lead car.

  The party was over, my friend.

  In the six weeks that followed, two other notable jewel auctions took place. At Sotheby’s in New York, the jewels of Flora Whitney Miller, the daughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, were auctioned along with the jewels of a Romanian princess and the singer-actress Pia Zadora, among others. Back in Geneva, at Christie’s, certain jewels of the Hon. Mrs. Reginald Fellowes; known as Daisy Fellowes, were sold in combination with jewelry from what the catalog listed merely as “various sources.”

  Unlike the Duchess of Windsor, both Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Fellowes, her contemporaries, were born to great wealth and great families. Mrs. Fellowes was the daughter of a French duke and a Singer-sewing-machine heiress. It was said that every time Mrs. Fellowes passed an advertisement for Singer sewing machines she crossed herself. Historically Daisy Fellowes is little more than a footnote in the memoirs and diary entries of social historians, although in fact she was just as relentlessly chic as the Duchess, far richer, and equally witty. She owned one of the largest yachts in the Mediterranean, the Sister Anne, one which the Windsors once sailed. Stories about her are endless. Once, a former footman with exceptional good looks, who had advanced himself from his position behind a dining-room chair to a seat at some of the best tables in the South of France, Palm Beach, and Beverly Hills, asked Daisy Fellowes if she missed her yacht, which she had recently sold. She looked at the fellow and answered, “Yes. Yes, I do. I miss it very much. Do you miss your tray?”

  The auction of her jewels and the auction of the jewels of Flora Whitney Miller were dispirited occasions in comparison with the Windsor sale. “This won’t be anything like that,” a Christie’s executive told me shortly before the Fellowes jewelry auction. “In all my years in the auction business,” she said wistfully, in remembrance of things past, “I never saw anything like the Duchess’s sale.”

  In the weeks following the sale, the Duchess’s jewels began appearing on fashionable necks, wrists, and bosoms. Elizabeth Taylor arrived at Malcolm Forbes’s party-of-the-year in Far Hills, New Jersey, wearing her Prince of Wales Plumes, and Mrs. Milton Petrie, who, when she was the Marquesa de Portago, was a great friend of the Duchess, walked into New York hostess Alice Mason’s party for former president and Mrs. Jimmy Carter wearing the Duchess’s articulated tourmaline-and-quartz necklace.

  At another dinner party in New York,
I heard Mr. Taubman describing, not immodestly, how he had restructured Sotheby’s and made it a profitable company. “I computerized it. I got rid of the advertising department entirely. They were doing institutional advertising. I said to them, ‘This isn’t an institution. This is a business.’ I didn’t do wholesale firing, as everyone said. I kept the best people, but I brought in experts to go over every department. Now we have a working operation. When I took over the company, they were doing 350, 375 million a year. Last year we did 900 million. By the end of this year, I expect we’ll do something like a billion two, a billion five, around there.”